![]() Joan Williams and Heather Boushey identify the “missing middle” as households that are between the bottom third and top fifth of household income, plus households in the top income quintile in which no adult has a bachelor’s degree. Our own Isabel Sawhill defines the group she calls “the forgotten Americans” as working-age adults without four-year college degrees whose family incomes are in the bottom half of the income distribution. Several experts have defined the middle and/or working classes using a combination of education and income. (We jest, but we liked this definition enough to quote it at length in our own report.)įormer Research Analyst - Center on Children and Families Department of Commerce has waxed poetic about middle-class aspirations. Another colleague suggested that being middle class is about having a tree in the front yard-and by extension, owning a home. One colleague of ours saw an Instagram post that quipped that every middle-class family has one fridge in the kitchen and a second in the garage. Intuitively, we tend to think about social class in terms of lifestyle, not money. ![]() ![]() Here are the definitions we courted before we fell for the middle 60: Honorable mention: Educational attainment Here, however, we want to tell the story of how we arrived at this definition, from the decision to focus on income instead of, say, educational attainment, to the selection of the wide range of households in the middle 60 percent.Īs with all summer romances, it is a story best told through our brief flings with near-misses. The Initiative’s definition page describes what we mean by income (pre-tax, pre-transfer income) and how we adjust for household size (the square root scale). For this reason, the above image should be viewed only as an approximation of the middle class’s placement on the income distribution. However, we have chosen to use income thresholds established by the CBO due to the CBO’s superior income estimates. The underlying distribution is the distribution of pre-tax, pre-transfer income across American households using CPS data, in household-of-three terms. We present this image only for illustrative purposes. This captures the 30 percent of households above and below median income, with incomes ranging from $37,000 all the way to $147,000 for a three-person household (or its equivalent), according to the latest data from the CBO: The shaded region roughly represents American households who are part of the middle class. Today, we published our definition of the “middle class”: The middle 60 percent of households on the income distribution. The crucial questions we need to answer are: why are we analyzing the middle class and its shifting fortunes, what are the main challenges they face, and how can the quality of life of the middle class be improved? All of this requires a reasonably clear idea of who we are talking about. It is difficult to describe the condition and challenges of the middle class without some clarity about who comprises the group in question. ![]() But our other purpose was to consider possible definitions for our work moving forward. In part, we simply wanted to catalogue these definitions, and to bring to light the normative aims that might motivate them. After all, you don't necessarily have to check any of those boxes to be considered middle class.This summer, the Future of the Middle Class Initiative at Brookings published a paper and interactive on the near-innumerable ways experts have defined the middle class. These responses were seen comparatively less, and it's easy to see why. Other common responses said that middle-class Americans have a budget, own homes, and are college-educated. The same can be said for the "ability to save money," as the same survey found that over 40% of people who consider themselves middle-class report living paycheck to paycheck. A Federal Reserve study showed that more than 40% of the population doesn't have over $400 in savings, and by definition, many of those who don't are considered to be middle-class Americans. Some of the others traits are somewhat of a grey area, such as having at least $1,000 in savings. After all, Americans who can't cover their basic expenses or are constantly unemployed or between jobs generally don't meet most other definitions of middle class. The top two responses - the ability to pay bills on time and having job security - certainly make a lot of sense.
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